Acer Aspire P3 Ultrabook Review and Ratings

Editors’ Rating:

Our Verdict:
The Aspire P3's gorgeous (if only 720p) IPS touch screen sparkles, and the pricing is reasonable, but this convertible tablet's half-baked design makes it unremarkable, if not frustrating to use at times. Read More…

What We Liked…

Brilliant IPS screen (once adjusted)

What We Didn’t…

4th Generation/"Haswell" CPUs loom

No touch pad on keyboard portion

Only one USB port

Screen occasionally dislodges from keyboard base when tapped

Acer Aspire P3 Ultrabook Review

Introduction & Design

We’re always leery of over-enthusiastic marketing—whether it's for tech or anything else. Nothing says, “This motion picture is going to bomb” quite like seeing the first teaser trailer in a theater 18 months before the release date. Or, take laugh tracks in sitcoms—the show isn’t funny enough to make you laugh on its own, so you need to be told when. In both cases, your impressions are being manipulated because the experience in question won’t be satisfying on its own.

So when we first went to the Acer Aspire P3’s product page and watched Acer's elaborately staged Tiesto tie-in video, our first thought was, “Meh. Love the Tiesto. The shameless grab for coolness? Not so much.” Likewise, the “Redefining the Computer” slogan on the page seems a bit...overblown. The Lenovo Yoga 13? Love it or hate it, that was a redefinition. As we’ll see, the Aspire P3 tries to carve out some middle ground between the elegantly bendable Yoga and Microsoft’s Surface tablets with mixed results. But it’s hardly groundbreaking here in 2013.

Then again, we can't blame Acer for trying. The computing giant likely needs a convertible laptop/tablet in its Ultrabook lineup and probably needed to hold pricing well under $1,000 to compete. After all, while our Aspire P3 config retails at $899.99, the Windows 8-based Yoga 11S started at $749.99 as of this writing. The Yoga 11S with the same Core i5-3339Y (3rd Generation/"Ivy Bridge") processor as the Aspire P3 lands at $999, but it also has twice the memory and SSD storage capacity. So for its specs, the Aspire P3 just about nails its appropriate price point.

Of course, having the right price only matters if you have the right hardware behind it. And that was our main beef with the Aspire P3. Every compliment we saw fit to grant it had a “Yeah, but...” tacked to its back end. Knowing that, and trying to keep the caveats to a minimum, let’s talk about what you can see and feel with the Aspire P3. It's certainly not a bad hybrid, but it's marred by a few curious design decisions—and overshadowed by a thing called "Haswell."

Design

The key feature of the Aspire P3 is its combination protective case and Bluetooth keyboard. Without this included accessory, the Aspire P3 is basically an 11.6-inch tablet.

The tablet fits into a gray plastic frame on the upper part of the assembly...

This frame has two slits on the bottom for the speakers and twin cutouts in the top that match the airflow vents on the tablet’s top edge. With the tablet inserted in the frame, another cutaway, on the right, exposes the tablet’s headphone jack, power button, and volume rocker...

We found that setting the volume at 100 percent output was enough to make music and movies still audible at arm’s length over a nearby air conditioner. (The speakers are typically tablet-tinny, but they don’t distort at high volume levels and are fine for occasional listening.)

The left-side cutaway reveals the tablet's mini-HDMI port, a single USB 3.0 port, and an AC adapter port. Note that the tablet’s 5-megapixel camera, whose lens is on the tablet's back, is blocked by the tray, and it’s often difficult to remove the tablet from the frame without accidentally pressing the power or volume buttons.

Both the plastic tray and the Bluetooth keyboard attach to a flexible, felt-like fabric backed by a black, leathery cover surface. A loop protrudes from the left edge of the cover, but it's only useful for holding an ordinary ink pen, as Acer’s display doesn’t offer active digitizer support. Here's a view of the left side and the cover's back, with the tablet in its frame and the pen loop visible...

The keyboard itself is impressively rigid, even when used on your lap, with empty space under the middle. Once we learned how to adjust our hand positions for the keybed’s offset within the keyboard area, we found the sensitivity and accuracy to be very good, with no noticeable dropped strokes or latency.

Because of the layout, however, some key locations took a little getting used to. For example, the Delete key is on the bottom-right next to the Alt key, and the much-shrunken Caps Lock shares its usual key space with the tilde (~). But the Enter and Backspace keys are both generously large, and there’s decent space between the inverted-T arrow keys...

Now, the crucial thing about the Aspire P3’s convertible aspect is its “hinge,” which is less of a hinge and more of a stiff fabric flap. The bottom of the plastic tablet frame fits into a groove that runs across the top of the keyboard, above the number keys...

In conjunction with the cover, this holds the screen in place at a fixed viewing angle. Said angle never changes, as we discovered while stuffed into coach class with the Aspire P3 between Portland and Chicago. On your lap? On a table? On the floor? Same angle. We know that the Microsoft Surface Pro, with its kickstand, suffers from the same ailment, but convertibles such as the Lenovo Yogas do not. Also, on several occasions in which we didn’t have the Aspire P3 on a hard surface, tapping and pushing on the screen knocked the LCD out of its groove. Buyers who use the P3 primarily for media consumption may not mind this as much. But those (like us) looking to remain productive in a wide range of environments are likely to be frustrated by that.

Some final notes on the keyboard: It has its own battery and charges via a micro-USB port on its left edge, near the power button. (Because there is no physical connection between the keyboard and the tablet, the keyboard needs its own power source.) Acer includes a short adapter dongle for charging the keyboard from the tablet’s USB 3.0 port. We strongly dislike this design choice, though, since there’s nowhere to tuck the dongle inside the case (save—perhaps, awkwardly—in the pen loop), and many users will likely lose this cable before long. We much, much prefer the Microsoft Surface Pro’s more elegant, contact-connecting design. Acer wins a couple of points for its lightweight, diminutive AC adapter, but the floppy, restrictive case-and-screen design, combined with the keyboard charger, leaves us feeling like the P3 is the kind of “redefinition” Orwell might have had in mind for the Newspeak dictionary. War is peace! More cables for ultramobile devices are plusgood!